In our first preview we detailed Hero Classes.
You can see the first preview here
In this second part, we’re going to cover all the other little features of 1.0.9, so we thought a blog & screenshot approach would be clearer.

Mail
We've introduced an in-game mail system.
Most of the rewards you receive in-game will now come via the mail. This includes login bonuses, defense rewards, weekly PvP rewards, VIP bonus rewards, and refunds (more on that below). You'll also receive guild invites in the mail now too!

Chat
Yes, we heard you! We know you guys like to chat, so we've added an in-game chat system - a real one. It has LOTS of channels to join, and every Guild has their own real-time chat channel, for discussing secret guild stuff!
Chat will also send out global broadcasts when players hit milestones, like unlocking legendary troops, leveling kingdoms to 10, or completing quest lines within a kingdom.

This shows a chat message being displayed on the world map. We disagree with it however! You can also see a notification on the Mail icon on the right - we have mail! Tapping the speech bubbles will take you to the Chat Popup below.

And here we see a secret Infinity Plus Two production meeting taking place inside the actual chat screen.

Refunds
From now on, when we make balance changes to a troop with a net negative result (I kinda hate the word nerf, unless we're talking about nerf guns), we will offer a refund on that troop for a week. We'll announce any refunds in the weekly blog here at gemsofwar.com. This gives us the freedom to keep the game balance in a much more healthy state, and allows you, the player, to upgrade troops without fear of wasting valuable resources.

This makes a lot of sense, since the Difficulty setting is not really part of the Hero.
Unfortunately we found that some new players were turning the difficulty up and then getting into trouble so we've locked difficulty until you reach certain level thresholds.

Also, difficulty now only applies to Quests and Challenges. We have removed difficulty from both Arena and PvP Invasion/Defense. Now as you progress in rank from 15 to 1, and in Arena from 0 wins to 8 wins, the AI Combo Breaker will gradually turn off, to make the games fair (and a little harder).

For anyone wondering what the AI Combo Breaker is, it’s a clever little piece of code that biases the game in your favor, making sure the AI never gets too lucky with gems dropping in (unless YOU get very lucky first!). We think that anyone progressing up to the top ranks of PvP/Arena deserves a bit more of a challenge though, so now you will get a fair fight!

We’re happy to announce that Patch 1.0.9 will be arriving very shortly!
Servers will be down for the update at the following time:

11:00am Australian East Coast (AEDT) Thu Mar 10th

4:00pm West Coast USA (PST) Wed Mar 9th

7:00pm East Coast USA (EST) Wed Mar 9th

12:00am (Midnight) London (GMT) Thu Mar 10th

Please note this Preview only applies to an upcoming patch for Steam, iOS and Android versions of the game.

No “bulk use” option, so still no realistic way for high level players to actually use all their maps. I have over 500 of the silly things and the only (mildly) interesting part about the treasure hunts for me is the random traitstones (but with my luck I’d probably get major traitstones anyway ). Everything else (except glory, which I have enough of anyway (I got on average about 5000 glory a week the last 3 weeks)) I can get much quicker doing PVP.

I might play a few to see what it’s like now, but I expect I’ll turn back to PVP after I’ve finished the new (and the extended) quests…

I like all of it except… The minimum level for difficulty.
I do my challenges on Warlord IV on purpose, and I’ve managed to build a team that typically gets it.
That’s because I want the maximum multiplier on the souls bonus from that challenge (which is what challenges are about, right?). As I’m lvl 140 right now, what you’ve effectively done is shut me out of this way of getting souls. And my current stage of development is that I want souls, souls, souls, souls and more souls.
I would prefer Warlord 1 - 4 to have the same unlock level, say 150. Those 10 levels I can wait.

Also, difficulty now only applies to Quests and Challenges. We have removed difficulty from both Arena and PvP Invasion/Defense. Now as you progress in rank from 15 to 1, and in Arena from 0 wins to 8 wins, the AI Combo Breaker will gradually turn off, to make the games fair (and a little harder).

Nice changes to treasure hunt.
Overall I’m quite happy with those changes (though less excited than I was with the previous update).

Only one thing seems to bother me : no difficulty settings for PvP? That sounds like less souls for me who always plays at least on hard difficulty… Anything to compensiate (in PvP only, I know arena’s gains have been increased)?

We think that anyone progressing up to the top ranks of PvP/Arena deserves a bit more of a challenge though, so now you will get a fair fight!

Can’t we just have a fun fight instead? Just speaking Arena, I’d rather get matched against teams having the same number of wins, that would automatically increase difficulty as you progress. Playing without the Combo Breaker is quite often a very unfun experience, you will eventually get hit by that dreaded miracle cascade, it will make you lose all Arena progress, you will feel cheated out of your rewards, because there was no way you could have avoided it. I guess it’s okay for PvP, there isn’t any significant loss attached to it, you don’t just drop right back to rank 15.

Also, difficulty now only applies to Quests and Challenges. We have removed difficulty from both Arena and PvP Invasion/Defense. Now as you progress in rank from 15 to 1, and in Arena from 0 wins to 8 wins, the AI Combo Breaker will gradually turn off, to make the games fair (and a little harder).

We REALLY REALLY wanted to increase the rewards for Arena in 1.0.9. (and we DID - see below)
200 Souls was low, but when we looked at the win/loss graphs for Arena, we had a massive number of people on zero wins, not very many with 1-7 wins, and then an equally massive number of people with 8 wins. That was weird, and it wasn’t really a healthy graph… the 400 Souls was just too easy to get, and that kind of stuff messes with the game economy. I can’t explain much better than that - I’m not the economy guy unfortunately.

In previous versions, prior to the difficulty settings, before the AI combo-breaker was a thing, the ratio of people getting to various Arena Win Milestones was much more what you’d expect. There were a lot more people on 2,3,4, etc… decreasing down to 7, and then a bit of a jump up to 8. This was fine.

So our hope with the current system is that we’ll see a return to that kind of distribution, which has the added bonus of allowing us to offer 500 Souls for a perfect run!